It Pays To Advertise

Readers of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal recently
were confronted with prominently placed advertisements bearing a
cryptic headline: "Why the St. Grottlesex education you enjoyed might
not be the best idea for your daughter.''

Placed by the Emma Willard School, a 177-year-old boarding and day
school for girls in Troy, N.Y., the ads were promoting research
indicating that young women perform better and express greater
confidence in a single-sex setting.

"St. Grottlesex,'' of course, is imaginary, an amalgam of top,
formerly all-boys preparatory schools in New England that became
coeducational in the 1960s and 70s. Such schools presumably were the
alma maters of the affluent business executives who were the targets of
the ads, which appeared on the arts page of the Journal and the opinion
page of the Times.

The ads caused a mild stir among America's leading independent
schools. "The coed schools have not been happy,'' says Robin Robertson,
principal of the Emma Willard School. "They perceived the St.
Grottlesex headline as a potshot at them.''

Although the school has taken a break from the high-profile ads for
now, they reflect an important new trend in the way such schools are
presenting themselves to the public: Many are moving beyond the
traditional glossy brochure and are promoting themselves by placing
paid advertising in local newspapers and regional and national
magazines and by buying time on radio and television.

While private school advertising is not by any means a new thing,
the current emphasis represents a marked change from the ethos of the
past. Independent day and boarding schools "have scoffed at advertising
for years,'' says Stewart Dunlop, admissions director of Brewster
Academy in Wolfeboro, N.H. "They have been reasonably elitist bastions,
and they have looked at marketing as something beneath the
schools.''

Now, however, the slow economy and demographic trends that have
reduced the ranks of potential applicants in the upper grades are
forcing schools to be more aggressive in attracting students. Brewster
is participating in an effort of a kind that is quickly gaining favor:
collaborative marketing by schools grouped by region or common
characteristic. Approximately 40 schools belonging to the Independent
Schools of Northern New England, a regional association comprising
institutions in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont, hired a marketing
company to develop ads designed to pique parental interest in private
school education.

The association has placed ads in The Boston Globe and the regional
advertising pages of such major magazines as Newsweek and The New
Yorker. "We have met with tremendous success, with over 1,500 requests
for information in the first year,'' Dunlop says.

A similar effort involving about 60 of the 80 member schools of the
Connecticut Association of Independent Schools is also under way. The
participating schools all contribute a relatively small amount of
money, which then enables the joint campaign to purchase ads. "The
motive is less marketing than market development,'' says CAIS executive
director, Peter Tacy. "The research has shown that a huge segment of
the public doesn't know what independent schools are.''

City and regional magazines are popular places for private school
ads because their readership demographics often match the independent
school's main target market--affluent parents.

The Western Boarding Schools Association, a group of about 30
schools, has used a variety of magazines to place ads offering a
directory of its members to interested parents. The magazines include
regional titles within their geographic area, such as Sunset, Alaska
Airlines, and Stanford magazines, plus out-ofregion magazines such as
Texas Monthly and Southern Living. The association has also placed ads
in general-interest, upscale magazines such as Smithsonian and
Gourmet.

Expanding the focus of advertising can have its pitfalls, however.
Such ads sometimes bring inquiries from parents who are not fully aware
that the member schools largely serve a successful, college-bound group
of students. "There are a lot of requests that we can't serve,'' says
Sue Nicol, admissions director at the Oregon Episcopal School in
Portland. "If we get respondents who say, 'His parole officer thinks he
needs a boarding school,' then we can refer them'' to an appropriate
alternative.

Still, advertising by private schools is not as recent a phenomenon
as some make it sound. The back pages of The New York Times Magazine
and other Sunday supplements have long contained small ads for a
variety of private schools.

And, in The Catcher in the Rye, the J.D. Salinger classic first
published in 1951, the character Holden Caulfield mentions with disdain
the ads for his boarding school, the fictional Pencey Prep. "They
advertise in about a thousand magazines, always showing some hot-shot
guy on a horse jumping over a fence,'' Holden complains. "Like as if
all you ever did at Pencey was play polo all the time. I never even
once saw a horse anywhere near the place.''

One strategy that is clearly different, though, is the way many
independent schools are taking to the airwaves to promote themselves.
The Church Farm School in Paoli, Pa., about 30 miles outside of
Philadelphia, shifted to radio commercials three years ago when
inquiries from its newspaper ads declined. Since the school serves
students from broken homes, it had to expand its reach beyond the
traditional independent school market. It has run commercials on radio
stations in the Philadelphia, Harrisburg, Pa., and New Jersey markets.
"We have tried news stations and other formats, but our most successful
[format] is country and western,'' says Jack Kistler, the school's
admissions director.

The Emma Willard School, meanwhile, is also making use of public
television to spread its message. The school is the sponsor of the
local broadcast of the popular new educational game show, Where in the
World is Carmen Sandiego? and advertises in the local public television
station's program guide.

Although administrators at Emma Willard hope the controversial ads
they placed in the Times and the Journal will attract new students to
their gate, they do not see themselves as the only benefactors. Every
all-girl independent school, they say, should also benefit.

"We did not see it just as an ad for Emma Willard,'' says principal
Robertson. "They truly are position statements on the value of
single-sex education.''

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